"Todd Haynes’s gorgeous 1995 metaphor for the AIDS crisis, Safe, is no less timely today. Julianne Moore turns in an amazingly subtle performance as a rich white lady struggling with a mysterious autoimmune disease who retreats to a wellness community. Her character predates all the gluten free, anti-vaxxer, yoga-obsessed, Goop-reading, Lyme-diseased ladies of today and shows what empty, sad, colorless lives their “authentic selves” are left to lead . . . Namaste, motherfuckers. While Safe is all muted colors, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s the in-your-face brash vision of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil. His plastic-surgery-victim women are camera-ready for a 2016 The First Wives of Beverly Hills reality show. I love this movie’s intoxicating mix of humor and horror."

"I guess the next one would be Fanny & Alexander. I had to put a Bergman on here, and I really struggled to choose between Fanny & Alexander and Cries and Whispers, especially because Cries and Whispers was a film that I screened for the crew of Hereditary. But the television version of Fanny & Alexander, which is five hours long, strikes me as the greatest of the Bergman films. It just has everything. It’s got his humor. It has his sense of wonder and it’s so dreamlike and so gorgeous. The performances are so incredible. It’s so sprawling. Then it gets incredibly bleak when the father dies and the children are shipped off to live with the bishop, who is one of the great forbidding Bergman villains, but that’s just a film I love and adore."

"I think he is funny. Badlands is funny. The voice-over in Days of Heaven has all sorts of humor. I watched both with my mum, and I really like Badlands but I was slightly frightened of watching it with her because I thought, “Oh, it’s violent,” but Badlands is so exciting. She really liked Badlands, and Days of Heaven she was kind of “hmm,” you know; she liked it, but it’s not as pulpy. There’s just something about the atmosphere of Days of Heaven and the end-of-days feel of it; and Sam Shephard’s performance, there’s something so great about it. It’s one of those films that — it’s almost like the question is, “What would you happily watch now, even though you’ve watched it a million times before?”"

"Black Moon is a quintessential “surreal” film. What interests me is that so many films that we would label surreal were made in the sixties and seventies, decades (and many art movements) after surrealism’s inception. By the time so many of these surreal films were being made, the prevalent trend in art was toward conceptualism and minimalism, approaches aimed at stripping away the non sequitur . . . which is, in essence, the guiding principle at work in Black Moon. What is also interesting to me is the tenor of most of these films. While Zéro de conduit captures a certain joie de vivre and sense of humor, which, I feel, is indicative of the early surrealists, the nature of many later surreal films generally seems much darker—more Max Ernst than, say, Magritte."

"Todd Haynes’s gorgeous 1995 metaphor for the AIDS crisis, Safe, is no less timely today. Julianne Moore turns in an amazingly subtle performance as a rich white lady struggling with a mysterious autoimmune disease who retreats to a wellness community. Her character predates all the gluten free, anti-vaxxer, yoga-obsessed, Goop-reading, Lyme-diseased ladies of today and shows what empty, sad, colorless lives their “authentic selves” are left to lead . . . Namaste, motherfuckers. While Safe is all muted colors, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s the in-your-face brash vision of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil. His plastic-surgery-victim women are camera-ready for a 2016 The First Wives of Beverly Hills reality show. I love this movie’s intoxicating mix of humor and horror."

"I can’t wait to see this new release! I have such incredible memories of watching this (probably just on a VHS borrowed from the library) and gushing over it with my mom and sister. All that gorgeousness, safe harbor from stupid rules, humor, light and landscape, and Kiri Te Kanawa blasting your heart out—such a welcome alternative for a young teenager into year six of the Reagan era. I am such a fan of how E. M. Forster’s novel engenders hope and the promise of a sane and healthy relationship between humans, love, and nature and themselves. This film is so fun, and feels like everything is coming from such a knowing, good, and caring place. It supports you! Be true to yourself, do the right thing!"

"My number one top love story would be Pretty Woman. This film wins because unlike so many films, this wasn’t a romantic comedy, it was a romantic drama, and yet there’s humor, the performances were unbelievable, the chemistry between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts was palpable onscreen. It hearkens to fantasy, like “I can be struggling but someone’s gonna see my true me inside.” And it captures all of that in a way that, at the time, felt utterly fresh and original, and you throw in the ending, wonderful. Of these movies, truly, this one is really the only happy one. Patrick Swayze was gone, Leo, sorry, he didn’t make it. Rick doesn’t get the girl. And Baby goes home with her parents at the end of the summer."